Jirrupin

Okay I do get fed up having to repeat myself, let me explain it once more and I will not venture into the cost/wages/expenditure again.

My job in UK, paid £30,000 if I could get the same job I would get paid $50,000. I can't get the same job here at the moment, jobs of a similar vein pay about $35,000 in Perth. The jobs I am applying for trying all different things to get a foot in the door are $15 casual work is widespread and that appears to be the rate of pay.

You can work out percentages as much as you like but if it takes a hour to earn £15 and a hour to earn $15 then to me they become equal in value.

if I had an equivalent job the annual take home pay here would be approx $40,000, (therefore a job of over $50,000). This would be a good take home pay for one person.

At the moment we are tied into rent of $260 a week, we are looking for something cheaper when we complete the lease. Then there are all the other costs of bills, car, insurance, food, medical, and we don't even think about clothes shopping as that would be a luxury.

If you can earn double the pay in UK then obviously the situation would be different, but if you can't then this IS the reality. I guess if you come out with loads of cash and can buy a house and car outright then you will not have the same weekly outgoings.

Some people will be in this situation and some will not. I cannot say we are starving because we are not, when the electric bill comes in we can pay it. But we couldn't save much to get a deposit on a house, we have obviously had start up costs too and have medical costs, but then these are the things that do affect this. In two months we have spent $7,000.

Our experience may be unique, but this is the way it is for us.

tennisoz

So let me get this right you are saying you were better off in the UK doing a particular job than you are in Oz in another job; so you conclude the cost of living is higher in Oz from your experience. No one is disputing that you aren't as well off in Perth because of your circumstances - they are just pointing out that this is not the way you measure the cost of living in Oz (or UK).

Incidentally the national minimum wage in the UK from October 2003 is £4.50 or $10.80 approximately. Don't you think most casual work in the UK would therefore pay less than $15??

TennisOz

Paul99

as others have pointed out that's bloody daft to compare like that. does that mean if I'm earning £5 per hour here for casual work that i'll be much better off in aus?

Yippee!!! I'll be rolling in it!! $15 per hour!!! Heck, I might retire in a few years. must remember to pack my sun lounger.

One other point, i see you both like to say pb, dotty were right etc but did your partner not know all this? thought he lived there before. was surprised to see the shock horror pb was right posts.

tennisoz

Noodle

Sorry to be one of those who has got your thread 'off track'. I'm sure though that you have had enough positive replies from others to give you some encouragement.

(Sorry also because I might have called you noddle elsewhere - it's a good Scots word for head eg at the football you hear 'hit it with your noddle' )

TennisOz

elbow

hi noodle,

it's absolutely p***ing it down in london here today. when we went to melbourne a few years ago in may it was probably raining harder and colder. Yet for all that i still want to be there more than any other place in the world.

Jirrupin

There are several people on the forum who feel unable to challenge using there regular username. Paul99 go and find someone else to play with.

young_lad

I don't think you've anything to apologise for.

I feel the recent posts (I presume you're talking about the posts discussing the costs of things) are an integral part of the overall feeling of "am I better off here?/ did I make a mistake?", and so is totally on track.

PeteY took time to post an intelligent and very well balanced post to give noodle a little encouragement. I know I've benefitted from his efforts, and I'm not even having asking those questions yet. Cheers PeteY.

I'm glad Jirrupin challenged PeteY because it provided an opportunity to talk a little further about the factors involved. After reading the reasoning behind Jirrupin's thinking I'm more encouraged than ever by PeteY's post. Hopefully noodle will too.


(Sorry to talk about you noodle, but you asked a question that I'll be suprised if I don't ask myself on some days in the future. I know some days will be difficult, and I'll be looking for the same kind of reasoned argument PeteY provided. So wherever I mention 'noodle' I'm kind of thinking of 'Young_lad in the future')

young_lad

Ah, spoke too soon!

Off track now.....

young_lad

We're having a good day today north of the Watford Gap. The 100% cloud cover is not quite as dark as yesterday (definitely a 'middle grey' today) and it's even stopped raining for the moment

Jirrupin

Young lad, if you have anything to say about my reasoning you can always say direct, in-direct swipes and alter egos aren't nearly as effective.

Herman

We are probably not your average couple as I get paid too much for what I do, but I can give you our like for like salaries and cost of housing in London versus Sydney. We did EXACTLY the same jobs in Sydney as we do in London and rented a very similar apartment in a very similar sort of suburb.

Our joint income in London is £130k and we pay rent of £1300 per month, or £15,600 pa, which equates to 12% of our income. To buy a decent 2 bed flat in the London suburb we live in (Wimbledon) would cost us about £350,000, or 2.7 times our income.

Our joint income in Sydney for the same jobs is approx $140,000 and we paid $1,800 per month in rent in North Sydney (similar standard of suburb to Wimbledon relative to whats on offer in both cities), which equates to 15% of our income. To buy a decent 2 bed flat in North Sydney is about $550,000, or 3.9 times our income.

For us, speaking personally of course, Sydney was more expensive than London. I would qualify this by saying that the job market in Sydney is weak and the housing market is frantic, which explains the differential.

PeteY

Herman, do you have any idea why Sydney housing is so expensive, in relation to the average pay in the city? I live in greater london, and although it is expensive we get by. From a bit of research, i have deduced that there is no way we would be able to survive (comfortably) in Sydney. The housing just seems daft in its pricing.

young_lad

This thread isn't about you Jirrupin. This is supposed to be a thread of support for a fellow poster. The debate that followed (weighing up the pro's and con's of such a move) was inevitable, as were differences of opinion.

I, like others (quite obviously) before me, found your argument to be misleading and illogical. Hopefully that should satisfy your request for 'directness' ....... if absolutely nothing else

I can't help satisfy your complaint about my name (my 'alter-ego') though. I don't think what I say in the body of my posts would be any more or any less 'effective' if I was called Old_fella, Whinging_Pom, John Smith or Paul Jones. If I we were to have this conversation face-to-face I wonder whether would you be more concerned about how I looked or what I said.

Sorry folks - off topic.

noodle

With all this money talk, I'd like to say that my husband is currently employed as a network engineer, earning £38k. He's qualified a a CCIE, which would earn him between $80 and $110k in OZ, which is slightly less than he'd get here, that's if he ever found a job!! A 4 bed nearish the beach in Melb would be from $350 upwards. We've got a mortgage of £70k here and we're pretty comfortable, but it looks like we'd really have to get a much bigger mortgage over there!

Herman

Like a lot of things, I dont know the answer but I have a theory!:

There are many native Sydneysiders who bought prime land in the 1950's to the late 1980's for absolutely nothing. Then the country shifted up a gear, the economy started moving, universities began to develop, migration fuelled population growth. It reached a point where land around the CBD became scarce and prices shot up. Lots of migrants continued to pour into the country, many bringing large sums of strong currencies with them, which added fuel to the fire. In the meantime the government began to offer tax breaks for investment properties losses, so those on decent salaries, or who had substantial equity from the boom to date, added even more fuel to the fire by chasing investment properties.
Add to this the trend for auctions and the unregulated unscrupulous behaviour of real estate agents and you have yourself a frenzied fire tearing through the Sydney real estate market.